“I don’t know why they called her Chickee,” she says. “Maybe because she was little and cute. She was strong, though. She could work circles around most of the men. But Tweetie, your great-grandma named him. Grandma’s mother. You remember stories about her—our Grandma Tucker?”
I nod. I don’t really remember stories about her, but I don’t want to say that.
“Well,” Vee says, “when Uncle Tweetie was born, his mama started calling him Sweetie, because she said he was the sweetest baby she’d ever had. That was saying something, because she’d already had twelve by the time he was born.”
“Twelve? Twelve?” I ask, amazed.
“Right. Twelve,” Vee says. “That’s how they did things then. Anyway, pretty soon everyone was calling him Sweetie, except for your great-grandma Tucker, who was only two and couldn’t say Sweetie. She called him Tweetie, and it stuck.”
“So what’s his real name?” I ask. “You know, like on his birth certificate.”
Vee laughs. “From what I’ve heard, no one gave a thought to birth certificates down in the country then. And by the time the last of the fifteen kids were born, the parents had run out of names, I guess. The later ones didn’t even get named at birth— the parents just waited to see what people would call them, and their names sort of evolved—like Tweetie, and Goober.”
“Where’d that one come from?”
“He was little, like a peanut.”
“Weird,” I say, but as I look at all those photos of people when they were young, and old, and in-between, I get this strange feeling, like I’ve got part of them in me. And I feel guilty for laughing at their names.
***
Two weeks later I’m on my way home, driving down Highway 101 in my dad’s pick-up truck. I feel so free it’s like I’m flying. I’ve never ever driven so far alone. The windows are down and the radio’s on full blast. I can’t find anything but country western but I don’t even care. Life is cool.
First thing when I get home I’m going to go pick up my stereo. Then I’m going to put the posters that I got at the Cal Poly bookstore up on the wall in my bedroom. They’re weird in the extreme—drawings by some old guy named Escher—full of optical illusions and misleading things—like you think a staircase is going to one place but when you look closely it’s totally different. I don’t even know why I like them so much. Just because they’re weird, I guess.
Anyway, after I get my music set up, and my posters up, and spray a little pine scent in the room to get rid of any leftover Rick odors, I’ll go across the street and invite Tracy to come listen to some music with me. Tracy is who I love, but she doesn’t know it. No one knows it but me. We’ve been friends for a long time, but one day, just before school was out, I looked at her, and I looked again, that was it. I was in love.
Tomorrow morning I’ll register for classes at Hamilton High School. This is going to be a cool year, my junior year—no more hearing Rick yell at me in the halls at school, “Hey, baby brother.” And I’ll get to use the car more often because Rick won’t be around to be borrowing it.
I think I’ll probably make varsity basketball this year. I’ve grown taller in the past six months, and I’ve beefed up some too, with all the construction work I’ve been doing. I don’t feel so much like a kid anymore.
By the time I can get a decent rock station on the radio, the sun is covered with a gray haze and I’m tasting smog. I don’t care. It’ll be good to be home.
I pull into our driveway about six-thirty. In time for dinner, I hope. I grab my duffle bag and the carefully rolled Escher posters and get out of the truck. God, it feels good to stretch my legs. Mom and Dad come out to greet me.
“Hi, Josh. I’ve missed you,” Mom says, giving me a big hug. Dad hugs me, too.
“Vee called a while ago. She said you boys did an excellent job on the room. I’m proud of you,” Dad says.
“We have a surprise for you,” Mom says.
Maybe they decided to get that weight set I’ve been wanting. We could take Rick’s bed out and there’d be plenty of room. I hope that’s what it is.
I’ve still got visions of a padded bench and weight rack when I see him sitting at the kitchen table—white-haired, skinny, wrinkled up like some old turkey neck. He’s eating Cream of Wheat. I don’t know much about fashion, but I’ll bet his suit has been in and out of style three or four times since it was new.
“Uncle Tweetie,” Mom says to me, like she’s announcing the President of the United States. She’s all beaming, like this must be the best news I’ve ever heard.
“Is this Josh?” he asks, standing and stretching his hand out to me. It’s bony, and cold, but he’s definitely got a grip. He can’t be more than five feet tall, and he’s got a broad nose and a wide smile that makes him look sort of like Happy in that Walt Disney movie about the seven dwarfs.
“Well, ain’t you just as handsome as can be?” he says, still pumping my hand. “You could be a movie star I betcha. You ever go down to Hollywood where all them movie star people are?”
“Uh, no,” I say.
“Well, it’s close, ain’t it?”
“It’s about fifteen miles from here,” Dad says.
“Ooooie,” he says in a long drawn-out sound, “I didn’t know it was that far away. I thought y’all were right close.”
Mom laughs. “You’ve just flown over fifteen hundred miles, Uncle Tweetie.”
“I know that’s what they say, Sugar, but I cain’t believe it.”
I carry my stuff back into my room. There’s a Bible setting on the bedstand between the two beds. I hope he doesn’t turn out to be a religious fanatic. God, I wonder how long he’s staying? I put my rolled-up posters in a corner of the closet. It doesn’t seem like they’ll fit here, with Uncle Tweetie.
Next to the Bible, on my table, is a can that once had creamed com in it. What’s that doing in here? I pick it up and check it out. It’s got some nasty brown gunk in it. I carry it to the kitchen, throw it in the trash, and wash my hands.
“You got anything sweet, Baby?” Uncle Tweetie asks Mom as she picks up his cereal bowl and takes it to the sink.
“I got you a rhubarb pie,” she says to him.
“Rhubarb? Y’all got rhubarb clear out here in California?”
Mom just laughs and gives him a peck on the cheek.
“Well, let me try some of it,” he says, reaching into his back pocket and pulling something out.
I can hardly believe my eyes as I watch Uncle Tweetie slip his lower plate of false teeth into his mouth.
“Want a piece of pie?” Mom asks me.
“Is that the only kind you got? Rhubarb?”
She nods.
“No thanks.”
“Why, I swear, this pie is about nearly as good as Chickee’s rhubarb pie,” Uncle Tweetie says to my mom. Then he makes a funny choking sound. Mom goes over to him and puts her arms around him while Dad pretends to be totally involved in TV.
“I know she’s in a better place,” he says, “but I miss her so much, all the time. Sixty-eight years I’ve been wakin’ up to her purty face.”
“I know,” Mom says. “I know . . . You must be tired now. Why don’t you go to bed, and we’ll talk some more tomorrow.”
He gets up and walks to the sink, rinses his lower plate, and puts it back in his pocket. Gross. I watch Mom leading him to my room, my room. So much for the first thing I’m going to do when I get home is set up my stereo. I flop down on the couch in front of the TV.
“How was your time with Vee?” Dad says.
“Okay,” I say. I really don’t feel like talking.
“I thought we’d run over to Circuit City and get the stereo setup I promised you.”
“Nah,” I say.
“What do you mean ‘nah’? You’ve been dying to get your own stereo and now you’re saying ‘nah’?”
“I’ll just wait until Uncle Tweetie leaves,” I say. “I mean, he’s going to bed at seven o’clock.
It’s not like I’d have a place to listen to music.”
“Well, get one with headphones,” Dad says.
“It’s not the same, Dad,” I say.
“Well, I won’t beg. Let me know when you’re ready.”
Mom comes back into the kitchen and starts rummaging around, moving papers and dishes.
“Lose something?” Dad asks.
“Uncle Tweetie can’t find his spit can. Have you seen it?” “Not since he got here,” Dad says. “I thought he left it in the bedroom.”
“Spit can?” I ask. “What do you mean, spit can?”
“Well, it’s Uncle Tweetie’s,” Mom says. “It’s what he spits his dip of snuff into when he’s finished with it.”
“You mean that creamed corn can?” I ask, feeling my stomach rise.
“Yes. Have you seen it?”
“I threw it away. God, Mom, it was rank.”
“Well, I’ll just have to find another can for him,” she says. She opens a can of tomatoes, empties the contents into a plastic dish, rinses the can, and takes it back to what I’d recently been thinking of as my bedroom.
“That makes me want to puke,” I say to Dad.
“Well, you know, Josh, he has different ways than we do. He’s just a country old-timer.”
All I can think of is the gunk in the creamed corn can that looked like something you’d find in the oil pan of some wreck of a car.
“Come on, Josh,” Dad says. “I know how you feel about your room, but he’s old and he needs some help. You’re hardly ever home, anyway. Don’t over react.”
That’s what my dad always says when I’m about to get screwed—I know how you feel and don’t over react. God, he doesn’t have a clue. Right now I feel like taking my sleeping bag and hibachi and going to live in a cave in the foothills, in private.
“How long is Uncle Tweetie going to stay?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” Mom says. “As long as he needs to. He helped me and Vicky out a long time ago, when we needed help. Now it’s our turn to help him.”
“Why didn’t he go to Vee’s then? She’s got as much room as we do now that the back house is fixed up.”
“Because he came here. That’s all. And we’ll all make him welcome, Josh . . . You’ll like Uncle Tweetie. You’ll see.”
Right. My mom thinking I’ll like someone is a good sign of the absolute opposite. Like the time she set me up with her friend’s daughter. “You’ll really like her,” she’d said.
This girl didn’t have a date to some big dance, which should have told me something from the beginning. But my mom told me it was because she, Penny was her name, went to an all-girls school and so she didn’t have a chance to meet any guys. I swear, I don’t know how I let myself get talked into stuff, but I do. Besides, my mom said she’d buy me three new CDs, and she’d let me borrow the car either Friday or Saturday of the next four weekends. I guess you could say I took a bribe.
When I went to pick Penny up for the arranged date, just as I was leaving, Mom said, “Remember, it’s the inner person that counts.” Man, I should have never left the house that night.
Then there was the time my mom was being Mother Teresa or somebody. She had this kid in class, Isaac, who lived just with an older brother and was like totally unsupervised. Mom teaches English at Margaret Sanger Junior High, near downtown. Anyway, she decided what this thirteen-year-old wannabe gangbanger needed was a role model. “You’ll like him,” she’d said. “You just have to get to know him.” So she brought him home after school one day and I taught him how to play backgammon and shot a few baskets with him out in our driveway, and after she took him home I was missing twenty dollars and two CDs. So to hear my mom say I’m going to like Uncle Tweetie does not make me feel great about Uncle Tweetie.
I go out to the garage, get the basketball, and start shooting baskets. Under my breath I mutter every cuss word I’ve ever heard, the “F” word, the “M-F” word, the “C” word, and all the little ones like shit and crap and bastard. I’ve about come around to the “M-F” word again when I feel Mom’s hand on my shoulder. I shut up.
“Josh, why are you so angry?”
I shoot another basket.
“Josh.”
I don’t look at her. I stand bouncing the ball.
“Josh, Honey, Uncle Tweetie may not even be here very long. Don’t be mad about something that may not even be a problem. Okay?”
“But, Mom, it’s like I don’t have any say at all. Every other guy I know has his own room, a place to have friends over, to play music. I’ve been waiting sixteen years for my own room! Then you and Dad just decide you’ll move some old man into my room without even bothering to talk to me about it.”
“Be reasonable, Josh. You weren’t even home, and it all happened so fast . . .”
“But you didn’t even care about how that would be for me!”
“We do care, Josh. But we care about Uncle Tweetie, too.”
“More than your own son?”
“Of course not, Josh. Now you’re being extreme.”
“Why isn’t he sleeping in your room? You’re the one who invited him. Or how about the bedroom Dad calls his office—put him in there.” I shoot another basket. It’s stupid to try to talk to her. She’ll never get it.
“You know, Josh, there’s more to life than having your own room.”
I shoot another basket. She stands and watches me for a while, then turns and goes inside.
I throw the ball hard against the backstop, back up, catch it, throw it again. I stay out there until the next door neighbor calls out his door, “Eleven o’clock!”
That’s all he ever says to anyone—eleven o’clock. When we first put up the backstop and hoop we had to agree not to play past eleven o’clock. I think he’s got his alarm set. I slam the ball against the garage door, twice, then go inside. My first evening home was not at all what I planned. No new posters up, no new stereo, no listening to music with Tracy in my room—just this old shriveled-up old Tweetie-bird in the bed across from mine.
***
In my dream I’m with Tracy in a forest. She’s holding my hand and smiling at me. We hear a funny sound, like an animal that’s hurt. Then we see a box of kittens, like you see sometimes outside a market, with a sign saying “Free to good home.” Tracy picks up a kitten and hands it to me, but it keeps mewing and mewing, and then she’s gone and the kittens are gone but I keep hearing the mewing. I turn over and know I’ve been dreaming, but the sound from my dream is still there. Through my window I can see the beginning of the grey light of early morning. I glance at my clock. Five-twenty. God. I listen, only half awake.
“. . . all our sins and griefs to bear. We should never be discouraged, take it to the Lord in prayer.”
It is Uncle Tweetie, lying flat on his back in Rick’s bed, singing.
“Uncle Tweetie,” I say, ready to tell him I don’t like to have to wake up before my alarm goes off at seven, but he starts talking.
“Mornin’, Son,” he says. “The Lord gave us another day.” He smiles a toothless smile.
I see that his teeth, both uppers and lowers, are sitting on the table between us, next to the can Mom gave him to replace the one I threw away. I turn over, hoping to go back to sleep.
“Me and Chickee met at a singin’ at a church over in Arkadelphia,” he says, in the kind of mushy way people without teeth talk.
“Every mornin’ when we woke up, and every night before we went to sleep, we sang a song. Sang together ever’ Sunday down at the Free Will Baptist Church, too. I don’t reckon we coulda lived together without that regular singin’. We both have strong opinions,” he says, as if she were still alive. “I been meanin’ to ask you, Son. You been saved? I don’t see no Bible in this room but mine.”
I stick my head under the pillow and will myself back to sleep.
The smell of coffee, bacon, and fried eggs fills the kitchen. Mom, Dad and Uncle Tweetie are sitting there munching out.
/> “Is it Sunday?” I ask, thinking maybe I’ve got my days mixed up and can go back to bed.
“Wednesday, Josh,” my dad says. “I’ll fry you an egg as soon as I finish eating,” he says.
“Okay,” I say. I don’t know why we’re having a real breakfast when it isn’t even Sunday, but I’m happy to eat it. Maybe they’re trying to impress the old guy. I look over at him, peppering his egg. He has his teeth in now.
“How is Cleopatra doing?” Mom asks.
“She’s the same, Baby. You know, she was out hanging up her washin’ one day and she just fell outta the world. I don’t think she’s ever comin’ back.”
“But she’s still living by herself, isn’t she?”
“Conrad brings her food, and they have someone go in and clean twice a week in the mornings. I reckon she’s as well off there as anywhere.”
Mom asks about Conrad then, and Precious and Henry and about a hundred people I’ve never heard of. Usually it’s rushed at our house in the mornings but I guess Mom and Dad must have gotten up earlier than usual. Maybe Uncle Tweetie sang them awake this morning, too.
As I leave for school, Dad is trying to teach Uncle Tweetie how to use the remote control for the TV. I’m halfway down the block when I hear Tracy calling me. “Josh. Wait up.”
I turn to see her in white shorts and a top that shows part of her stomach. Her hair is sunbleached and she’s got a great tan. I think about how she held my hand in the dream and I feel my face and neck getting all hot. I hate that! I hope she doesn’t notice.
“Walk with me,” she says. “Are you on your way to register?”
“Yeah. I have a nine o’clock appointment.”
“Me, too,” she says.
We walk the seven blocks together, talking about our summers. She’s been at her dad’s most of the summer, someplace down near San Diego. I want to tell her how great she looks, but the words get stuck in my mouth.
“What classes will you be taking?” she asks me.
“You know, the usual college prep stuff. And Peer Counseling. I want to take that. My brother liked it a lot. He says Mrs. Woods is a cool teacher.”
“I’ve been thinking about that, too,” Tracy says. “But I want to take ceramics, too. I can’t fit two electives into my program.”
Beyond Dreams Page 15
